US media has been debating the virtues and vices of a recent proposal by Donald Trump to allow certain teachers to carry arms in the classroom as a way to combat against the school shooting epidemic.

….History shows that a school shooting lasts, on average, 3 minutes. It takes police & first responders approximately 5 to 8 minutes to get to site of crime. Highly trained, gun adept, teachers/coaches would solve the problem instantly, before police arrive. GREAT DETERRENT!

….If a potential “sicko shooter” knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school. Cowards won’t go there…problem solved. Must be offensive, defense alone won’t work!

While my own view is that such proposals can only be analysed on a case by case basis, what many opponents of Trump’s proposals fail to realise is that the foreign policy of the United States has made the need for ordinary citizens like teachers to arm themselves, a daily reality in countries throughout the world, much to the sadness of those who have no choice but to take up arms to defend themselves.

In Syria, US backed terrorist groups in Eastern Ghouta have been firing rockets at schools in Damascus for years, while recent attacks have increased due to the Syrian Arab Army’s slow but steady advances against al-Qaeda and FSA terrorists.

Meanwhile in Lebanon, public places ranging from hotels to shopping centres have for years been forced to have metal detectors and armed security due to the instability that US ally “Israel” caused in the country since the civil war, the very roots of which can be traced to the initial displacement of Palestinians after the Nakba of 1948. From Iraq to Pakistan, The Philippines to Sudan, ordinary people are forced to bear arms in spite of their wishes for peace and all of it has been a direct result of American meddling in the sovereign affairs of foreign nations.

When it comes to ‘gun control’, the US military needs it far more than any other organisation or set of individuals in the world. The trigger happy wars which have seen the destruction of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and much of Syria have been caused by an attitude no different than that which fills the perverse heads of school shooters in the United States. The only differences are the crucial matter of scale and the fact that while the mass murderer in Florida will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars or be executed, the mega murderers in Washington have not and likely will not face even the slightest justice.

Yugoslavia in particular, was transformed from a united, peaceful state with one of the lowest crime rates in modern Europe, into a fractured pastiche of poor and corrupt states. In the NATO occupied Serbian Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, the Albanian mafia rules mean streets where guns are pervasive and trigger happy thugs rule the roost. The schools and churches of Serbia that have been bombed to smithereens by NATO never did capture the hearts and minds of most Americans, even though the Serbian people could tell the US just how bad it is to suffer a ‘mass shooting’ at the hands of US bombers and missiles.

While the world continues to sympathise with the loss of life in US mass shootings like the 2017 Las Vegas shooting and the recent shooting at the Florida school, US citizens remain largely oblivious to the mass shootings, bombings, violent coups and ethnic cleansings that their own government and military is responsible for across every continent on earth.

The world is rapidly running thin on its empathy for an American public who refuse to empathise with the plight of foreign victims of mass killings which are conducted by the US government. Before even starting the debate on whether the US has turned itself into a pale imitation of the places it has victimised, thus requiring arms in the classroom, people in the US ought to reflect on a global culture of violence that its military has exported and that is now blowing back home.

Tragedy begets tragedy and as violence begets violence. It is time for the US to remove its guns from overseas and thus ending a culture of violence that has filled schoolyards from Fallujah to Florida.